This Place Was a Shelter
by tore-my-yellow-dress
Summary: Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III wins his second term by five million votes, and she had no hand in tampering with the election, yet still her fingers tremble like terrible things, like she's getting ready to commit murder.


**A/N- Tissues necessary. Written because my muse did funny things to me after the new episode tonight. Woops. Feedback would be very appreciated! But I forewarn; this is sad.**

* * *

The results reach her fourteen minutes past eleven and she stands on legs that do not shake, clasps hands with anyone who meets her. A rag doll in Prada. Not like it was the first time, not by a mile and a million. People are congratulating her on an excellent campaign and everybody is so loud it's a drone, buzzing in a beehive, trying to get through the room but slowed like stuck in honey, and it's not like it was the first time at all.

Fitzgerald Thomas Grant wins his second term by five million votes, and she had no hand in tampering with the election, yet still her fingers tremble like terrible things, like she's getting ready to commit murder-

And maybe she is.

He wins, and this is the beginning of the end.

/

There is a moment where she doesn't know whether or not she can go through with it. Where she stops, just before she opens the door, stares at the wood, the little lines in the grain, and has to physically restrain herself from crying out. Clasps a palm over her mouth, does not cry.

She tells herself she cannot cry because crying would be too easy.

And he, he of all people, will not believe a word of what she says if her lips tremble. Fitz knows her better. Fitz knows her best. That's what makes everything so difficult. Why, no matter how many times she walks away, she knows this is the last, because she can't keep ripping her soul in two every time the world has to right itself again, every time their fairy tale bleeds out between her gums, and she's trying not to gag on the finish line.

She's thinking how impossible love only exists in books she read in middle school, how the media would have called Juliet a starry eyed whore.

Olivia grasps the handle and pushes open. Sees him, and does not flinch.

He looks so much older than he did, the first time through. It's not the color of his hair or the definition around his brow, but the way his eyes meet her's. Like old lovers. He still looks at her like he did day one, that same passion, desire, but with time, with weathering, she can tell he's exhausted of his own fumes. Happy, but worn. A man who rules the free world. She looks at him and sees the President of the United States. Four years ago, she would have looked at him and just seen Fitz, her Fitz, with his cub like paws capable of tearing through anything.

"Liv," he greets, from behind his desk. "I did it," he tells her, like he's almost surprised by it himself, and that makes her stomach hurt, makes her think she might throw up. She always knew he could do it. Even if he doubted, she always believed. Always.

They meet in the middle and he kisses her with a mouth full of promises. She clings to him so tightly, and it's not like the first time, with swinging around and love on the counter. They just hold there. Hold each other.

She kisses him so hard she thinks her lips will bruise with the ferocity. All she can think is goodbye and she can taste goodbye too, digs her nails into the back of his neck like she wants to mark him, no matter how temporary. This love is a tattoo on her soul, and she wishes permanent ink was easier to hide.

He doesn't know this is their last kiss, so he's the one to break it, gently. Their lips departing, becoming just mouths again. Mouths used for words they can never take back, and words that will change the whole game. She was his wild card, in the beginning. She steps away from him. Pointedly.

She makes her face blank like she never has before. Speaks like every word isn't a lie, and maybe it isn't. Maybe she half means the things she says. It's too late to keep thinking about it, anyway. It happens so quickly typing up a letter and leaving it on his desk had been more strenuous. There is no backspace for this. No delete.

"Fitz, I'm leaving."

The way his head cocks to the side might actually be funny if it wasn't so innocent, so pathetic. He really doesn't see it coming, which makes it more heartbreaking than she can fathom. Like a hole is being punched through her chest, and she doesn't alter her features. She speaks like she's reading him.

Serious. She's being serious with him, no quaver, no muss.

He takes a step toward her and she doesn't take a step back.

"Livvie-

"Fitz, I'm leaving-

"Olivia-

"-because I'm love with Jake," she finishes, and the way Fitz's entire face contorts, like he's been struck, it's something that will never leave her, not until the day she dies. Fitz looks at her, and he knows when she lying, but.

But there is nothing on her face that says she is lying to him, and he, the leader of the free world, staggers forward like he's been punched in the gut. His blue eyes are shining in the dimmed Oval Office lighting, glittering like wasted stones. "I asked if you were in love with him," he chokes. "I asked you and you said-

"I know what I said," Olivia rushes, grits her teeth to steady her voice, forces out the syllables steadily, like reciting an essay. Dignified, in the ugliest way. "It looked like you were going to drop out, and at the time even I was denying," her breath hitches at the word, evens in the same moment, "my feelings toward him. But I do- I want to spend the rest of my life with him."

Fitz makes a sound, almost a whimper. "Livvie, I will give this up, I will fight for you-

She knows what her final argument is. Three weeks ago, she sipped grape juice and ate popcorn, looked up at her ceiling in the silence and realized the linchpin. The answer key, the reason any of this will be possible. It's the worst kind of weapon, selfish and damning, and she hates herself for ever opening her shotgun mouth. But she does. She does.

"Let me be happy, Fitz," Olivia pleads. She drops her voice so that she sounds desperate, like a woman searching for a way out of a loveless marriage, like a beggar banging on a closed door. "I love him so much."

Her voice cracks in all the right places, and he believes her.

He doesn't know she's crying because he's actually believing her.

Fitz begins to cry, big, rolling tears that shake his chest, and just like that, she knows she's winning the war of deception. She's killing him and she's not even touching him. He was the President of the United States, but standing before her like this, broken, he's stripped down to what he was four years ago. She puts a nail in the coffin, says, "If you ever loved me, Fitz, you'll let me be happy."

He looks at her right in the eye, suddenly, sharply. The tears stop coming. Like he's just realized his own epiphany. "Okay," is all he murmurs.

Just, okay.

She turns to leave like a weightless soldier, a ghost in her own skin. Feels faint, but turns just as she's about to go, turns and gets one final look at him, in the flesh. She looks at him and sees the other half of her being, she sees her future, her past, all that she has the potential to be. Could have been. He is so handsome, so perfect, and she just- she just looks at him, almost loses it. She burns the image of him into the back of her mind, memorizes the way he looked when she leaves him, just as she's memorized how he looked the first time he heard her name. God, she loves him so much.

"Stay in office," she demands, weak.

He doesn't miss a beat. "It's all I have left," he admits too softly, still standing there in the middle of the room, says it like it's a simple truth. She wants to protest his words, but doesn't. Knows if she stays too much longer, she won't be able to keep the mask on her face."Goodbye, Fitz," she tells him, low, barely there.

She turns. She opens the door.

She leaves.

/

President Fitzgerald Thomas Grant III is the first President to go through a divorce while in office. Mellie files on a Sunday. Olivia keeps in touch with Abby, with Harrison, with Huck, but the two months that hits the news cycles she lets the papers pile up in the driveway of her new house in the suburbs of the Midwest. Cyrus calls her twenty seven times.

She ignores them all. Folds laundry while Jake keeps the television at a volume not loud enough for her to make out. Jake says no one from the Secret Service has ever tried to tail her, and Olivia remembers in echoes, how Fitz once said to her if there was any man fit enough to keep his secrets safe, it was Jake Ballard. Irony is a funny thing.

Olivia kisses Jake and wonders how he doesn't still taste Fitz in her mouth.

There is never a night she does not dream of minutes that ceased to exist the moment she shut the door. But there are other things, so many other responsibilities, and before long dreamland is just an alternate reality with jam instead of preserves, with stronger arms that hold her. Jake killed her father so that Fitz could stay safe, and Olivia killed her mother so that Fitz could stay safe, and anything that happened before was just a pipe dream.

/

Mellie finds happiness, so that's something. The wedding pictures are the front page of New York Times, and that week Fitz's ratings hit an all time low, because ex first lady Mellie Grant marrying the Vice President of the United States is never, ever a welcome scandal. But Fitz speaks of how happy he is for them, how there are seemingly no hard feelings, how the kids love their new step-father, how professional can be separated from the personal.

Nobody swallows that bullshit, and so the numbers take a dive.

/

Three years after Olivia left Washington, she reads the headline, "President Grant's Drinking Problem?" over a bowl of oatmeal. Her eyes scan the article fast, how it talks about the way he staggered at the last gala, how people could smell alcohol on his breath. How inside sources are spilling on the ongoing issue. If it were a celebrity, it would be a different ballgame, but he's the leader of the free world, and the beating he takes has Olivia turning on the news full blow, has her chewing at her nails until they are bloody. Jake gets home and he takes care of things because she can't.

And Olivia almost calls, but she doesn't. Jake rocks her to sleep that night, tries to soothe her with words, but all she can repeat, like a mantra, is "He's hurting, he's hurting, he's hurting."

And she's hurting. She's hurting.

/

Fitz leaves office with one of the lowest approval ratings in history. When the analysts looks back on his presidency, they see it as a roller coaster of highs and lows. Finished with the ride, onto a more positive, steady outlook. Onto a president who will do more for the country than fire up headlines with personal drama. The worst say that Fitz was just as they'd said in the beginning; a spoiled boy who couldn't keep it in his pants. Couldn't believe he'd made it through a second term. A montage of faces, of scandals. There's a picture they run through over and over, the one of she and him in the rose garden. Smiling. Blissful.

They compare her to Monica Lewinsky and wonder why she hasn't published a book yet. Olivia unplugs the cable box. Jake doesn't try and fix it.

/

He runs his tired fingers over the dust collected fireplace and says to no one in particular,

"You told me not to sell it."

He didn't. He looks around the empty home and imagines it filled with laughter, knows it never will be. He's been living without shelter for over four years and this place in Vermont, this isn't a living place. This is a shell. A skeleton of love, and he can see the old sheets that have lied on the floor for four years.

They had come here, just before it had all ended, just before he'd won.

For good luck, he'd suggested. A toast to the future. Things had been tense, anyway, with the faking, with Mellie and Andy, with Sally and her shit, but he had swore he would show her there was an end, a light waiting for them. She'd only been to this place twice, but that night they had danced to his heartbeat and christened every surface. Every room. Stayed up until dawn making the sweetest love, and he never thought-

He could've sworn she was still in love with him, but maybe.

Maybe he just saw what he wanted to see, and anyway, it doesn't matter now.

Those last few ratings didn't even faze him, like buzzing in a beehive, and security detail is out to get lunch. It's a lovely day, blue skies, and Fitz looks at the dust collected place he'd built for them, cast over with light streaming through the windows. A place for a family with the only woman he's ever loved, his Livvie, and she's gone, and he knows he can't stay here, but he-

He doesn't know where else to go.

But see, he's thought about this before, thought this through a thousand times over the past four years, even longer than that, and there's a reason he's here to say goodbye. With calm, steady steps, he goes to the bedroom that would have been their own, opens the closet door. He swallows thickly, and with hands that do not shake, he pulls out a case.

/

She's braiding her doll's hair to match her own, digs her scraped up knees into the soft fibers of the carpet and sits back on her heels. It's almost time for Word Girl, and she's waiting patiently, stomach full of peanut butter and jelly. It's been a quiet afternoon, with her mother vacuuming the living room, the TV set to the news coverage that's on before the little girl's show.

The four year old finishes up, glances up at whatever is on the screen.

"Mama," she calls out, loudly. "Mama, Mama, look! It's your President!"

The rumbling sound of the cleaning tool stops. Small eyes can see, but do not comprehend. There's a picture of the President, the old one, the one Daddy says Mama knew, that Mama helped be President, there's a picture of him- and then there's a video playing, the view of a pretty house from the vantage point of a helicopter, the image-

The image that will stay with the little girl, for as long as she lives, is the stretcher with the white sheet.

She sees that, and then she hears her mother scream.

It's a horrible sound, so ear shattering she almost goes to cover them, tears filling her big blue eyes from the shock, the startle. "Mama," she whispers. Her mother falls to her knees just as the little girl is, in front of the television. And her mother is crying, and she doesn't know why.

"Mama, what's wrong?" She's whimpering, trying not to cry because she's not a baby. She's four and a half years old. But her mother is scaring her, the way she just sits there and bawls, no more noises save the talking of the reporters. The details of a gruesome death.

A gun to a temple.

Suddenly, her mother pulls her into warm arms. Holds her daughter to her chest and kisses her forehead, the crown of her sandy curls. She holds her daughter and she rocks her, clings to the only thing in the world that matters, the child she gave up everything to protect.

"It's okay," Olivia tells her daughter, half hysterical. "It's all okay, baby. We're gonna be okay."

The little girl looks at Olivia with Fitz's eyes.

As long as she lives, she'll always remember the day her mother shattered over her father's suicide. The father she'll never know.

"Okay," her daughter accepts, still shaken, but trying to make sense of it all. Trying to understand things a little girl should never be burdened with. Lies and secrets. Scandals and dead. "Okay."

Just, okay.


End file.
